Agentic RAG cost tradeoffs

An ACL 2026 Industry Track paper compares enhanced RAG and agentic RAG across quality, cost, and operating scenarios. Why it matters: Agentic retrieval can improve difficult retrieval tasks, but it adds latency, orchestration complexity, and spend that simpler RAG patterns may not need.

Try this: Before adding agentic retrieval, write one sentence explaining why iterative tool use should outperform a cheaper enhanced-RAG baseline.